COCKERING YOUR HUSBAND.
THE Saturday Review, in the course of its exhaustive, not to say rather exhausting, campaign against women, has indicted them formally in its last nnmber for having entirely ceased to cocker up their husbands, at least as regards all physical comforts. It seems that the class of wives who have to manage on five hundred a year no longer take thought for their husbands' dinners, that they no longer feel a deep and tender sense of mingled com- passion and self-reproach—as if they had done something selfish not to say criminal—when they set him down to dine on cold mutton, or to a plain joint without tart or a pudding; that they have lost all that anxious pride in their households which used to induce them to go about with a duster giving a finishing touch to a chair-leg here and there, or to the crannies likely to be neglected by the coarser feeling of the hired housemaid, like the tops of doors and other ledges least conspicuous to common eyes,—in short, that they no longer lay themselves out to ward off small an- noyances from their husbands, or to win them small gratifications,— that they have ceased to regard this as one of the pleasantest privi- leges of wifedom. Not having the extensive knowledge of English society which is requisite in order to tell whether a larger proportion of wives fail to contribute to their husbands' happiness thanformerly, we do not feel competent to pass any opinion on the very positive assertion of our contemporary, who appears, indeed, to have access to some authentic statistical information on the subject. But as the gloomy character of the view taken by this caustic writer seems to turn partly on the notion that it is the new ideas about education which interfere with this paramount duty of a wife's life, and that the more intellectual she gets, the more it will interfere with her homely interests in her husband's dinner and the other trifles on which his comfort depends, we may perhaps be relieving the minds of some despondent students of the English Press, if we point out how little the metaphysics of this important subject support this opinion.
The essential conditions of capacity for a successfuleockering of a husband seem to be two ; first, loving him, without which cocker- jug would not succeed ; and next, a pleased sense of mild superiority to him in relation to all the little details on which he most needs cockeriug ; and,—as almost involved in this,—a certain subtlety of perception as to the manner in which he is best pleased to be cockered, whether by an open desire to please him, or rather by a latent and vigilant pre-arrangement of events, so as to fall out into apparent coincidence with his pre- possessions,—the female ordinances by which this is contrived being as carefully hidden as the machinery of a musical box from the eye. Now, perhaps, it will be granted at once that ' the higher education' has absolutely nothing to do with the first condition of a truly cockering mind. We won't go so far as to say that a woman's ' culture' would never prevent her loving the man she marries, but at least it is no great compliment either to men or to women to suppose that this would be very often the case, for it would imply that it helps women to see through men, which is uncom- plimentary to men, and that it does not help women to tell the truth when they are asked to marry, which is uncomplimentary to women. And as it may be assumed, without any great violence, that education will do as much to open some women's eyes to the merits of men as to open other women's eyes to their deficiencies, the tendency of the higher education' in relation to this indispen- sable condition of a cockering mind, love for your husband, may fairly be assumed to be neutral. But we strenuously maintain that in relation to the second and more special of the conditions affecting the power to cocker, the higher education is a fresh and great facility. We lay it down as a canon which the fullest investigation will only more and more establish, that an attitude of placid and mild superiority to your husband, —an indulgent frame of mind such as you feel towards a pre- possessing child or a spoiled Skye terrier,—is absolutely essen- tial to a large capacity in this direction. A certain benignity, a playful condescension of nature, is one of the highest possible qualifications for this great gift. It is, of course, not to be con- ceded for a moment that this is any way inconsistent with a quasi- religious reverence for your husband on what you darkly suppose to be his own peculiar ground. There, in his own high region,— be it of scholarship, or political economy, or commercial mysteries, or literary attainments, or legal, or medical, or theological research, —he is still your hero, grand, masterful, inexplicable. And the existence of a region in which you thus abase yourself before him, even in your secret hearts, is possibly almost essential to the levity and pleasurable reaction of that other attitude of mind in which you feel authorized to look down upon him as a child that needs an indulgent treatment, an almost compassionate care. A woman never fairly enjoys her part as a wife who does not patro- nize her husband a good deal on small points, and who is not mildly conscious of her own superiority to him in that emancipa- tion of spirit which makes her indulgence of these fancies of his seem so very like spoiling him. If you yourself attach any real im- portance to the little matters you look after for him, so far it is not properly " cockering." When you lament over him when he comes in wet and cold from a snowstorm, or bathe his head when it aches with eau-de-Cologne, or see that be has his tonic at the right hour when he is ill, or scold the servants for disturbing his nap before he seta to his evening work, or " break " .a very unexpected bill to him,—in all these cases you are simply giving him your hearty sympathy,—not cockering him up. But it is in taking care that his food is as he likes it, that that odd fancy of his is gratified about having Yorkshire pudding with roast beef, or that that curious dislike to being fidgeted by the servant's entering to draw down the blinds and shut the shutters in his study, is humoured, or that that unfortunate taste for plenty of cream in his tea, which spoils it so to your finer percep- tions, is satisfied,—it is in these things that you feel the full delight of cockering your husbands up, and that your faces beam 4' with something of angelic light " in conceding to his frailty what you feel entirely independent of for yourselves. Nay, a -truly cockering wife will usually withhold something out of very self-denial, and in order to clinch the sense of free gift with which she gives what she does give. It seems so clear to her that all of these superfluous little caprices ought not to be humoured on principle, lest her husband come to want something which is really bad for him, that she will fix on some- thing to deny herself the pleasure of giving,—something which she fancies a little extra capricious or, perhaps, even not truly lgood for her husband to have,—and will preach a placid little ex tempore sermon on the occasion, exhorting him to meekness and submission. ' You cannot want candles, my dear, so soon ; do rest your poor old eyes a little, or you will quite wear them out. Remember what Cowper says :— "'Not nndelightful is an hour to me So spent in parlour twilight,"
—and so forth.
Now, the drift of our observations is this,—that " the higher .culture" opens an immense field to women in this respect, instead of closing it. They will humour, with a still milder tenderness of pity, the various caprices and frailties of their husbands, if they are still more deeply imbued with the " sweetness and light " of high intellectual culture. Suppose education helps them to realize,— what, indeed, they mostly recognize now,—that a man's taste (say) for cheese is a coarse appetite which they cannot even wish to share, or that his impatience of unpunctuality in the dinner hour is due to a physical vehemence of nature which they think ought to be, more governable, still, their higher culture' renders them more tolerant than they otherwise would be of these inferior impulses, and heightens their sense of angelic superiority. They have learned, probably, that there may be some connection between these arbitrary fancies, these wil- ful tastes, and the great driving power which carries on the dead work of life. They have not learned history and studied literature without seeing that something of the force of life may be due to the wilfulness of man,—something which it would not be quite well to annihilate, and which can best be modulated by a gentle and benignant tolerance. A true woman seldom thinks of a man as of a wholly reasonable being ; and culture only helps her to discern greater regions of irrationality in him, without fretting, nay, not without complacency, at the discovery. It is only the narrowest kind of women who take no pleasure in the odd little individual traits of their husbands' characters. Mr. Arnold has connected very closely together " sweetness and light," and they are nowhere more closely combined that in the tolerant indulgence of an educated woman with a delicate gift for cockering. The sweetness without the light would be insipid. For there is need not only of tolerance, but of subtle discrimination in the mode of showing it. Men are not nearly so happy if they only get their way, and are not made aware that their odd little fancies are at once indulged and understood as light caprices, which might at any time be shaken off, but which their wives humour because their own sense of humour is gratified by compli- ance. A woman whose husband can't bear to see her dusting, or can't endure to know she has been in the kitchen looking after the pastry,—and there are such men, in spite of the Saturday reviewer, —looks twice as gracious when she has just nimbly whisked away her duster under the squab of the sofa, and turns with a dignified look towards the opening door, or when she has blandly feigned gratification at the pastry which they both perfectly well know that she herself has made, as she would if there were not a touch of humorous condescension in her state of mind. It is not merely the acquiescence which is attractive, but the mutual understanding that the whim is a mere whim, which there is a special delight in gravely humouring. The shadow of the smile with which the acquiescence comes, the expression which tells your husband that you are accommodating yourself to his unreason, because it is his, and enjoying it, is half the grace of the conces- sion. And what gives this more than " the higher culture ?'' When the greengrocer's wife blurts out before her husband's face :—" Harris, he can't abear to be worrited at his dinner hour, and what's more, I won't have the poor dear worrited by anybody, —that's flat !"—Harris will probably burst out ill-temperedly that he would just as soon have a worrit at that time as at any other, simply because he is jarred by this naked assertion that he posi- tively needs to be gratified in what he knows to be only a whim. But when an educated woman smiles, " We're at dinner, Susan. No, my dear, you really must not go out,—I have a weakness for not being disturbed at meal-times," her husband feels that he is under an indulgent "economy" which is adapted graciously to his fancies, but that his wife perfectly enters into the intrinsic weak- ness of his nature, and covers it by the pleasant fiction that she has herself adopted his tastes, and makes it a favour to her that he will not waive them. The uncultivated woman thinks her hus- band really needs these little gratifications, and grates upon him by showing that she thinks so. The cultivated woman secures them by some device which makes her husband see clearly that she knows they are rather arbitrary fancies, and indulges them on that very account. So far from culture unfitting a wife to cocker up her hus- band, she is almost unfit for that great duty without it. The power of entering into " the infinitely little," and recognizing it fairly as infinitely little, and yet yielding its true importance in life as of grace, without stupidly overrating it, is given chiefly by culture. And how can any woman cocker up her husband successfully with- out the subtle discrimination which enters into all these shades of feeling, and adapts itself delicately to them all ?
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